Watch: "Morning Joe" Says White People Could Have "Pounds of Coke" and Not Get Shot by Cops

Watch: “Morning Joe” Says White People Could Have “Pounds of Coke” and Not Get Shot by Cops

September 23rd, 2016

On yesterday’s episode of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the eponymous host Joe Scarborough asked some very relevant questions about the fatal police shooting of Terence Crutcher.

Tulsa police have claimed that Crutcher, a black man who was unarmed with his hands up when he was shot, was in possession of PCP in his truck. Scarborough questioned what, if anything, the PCP had to do with the shooting of a man who did not appear to be a threat in any way, and who was not driving his vehicle at the time.

As Scarborough put it:

“If you’re white, if you’re from the neighborhoods that we live in, and your arms are in the air, you could have, like, pounds of coke in the back and be straight out of Miami Vice and you wouldn’t get treated like that.”

Scarborough went on to call for a national policy of body cameras for officers, though multiple videos exist of the shooting in this case.

The public nature of these two videos may be part of why Officer Betty Shelby has subsequently been charged with first degree manslaughter. Ironically, it has emerged that she has a history of drug use, herself.